Saturday, July 22, 2017

Is Reliance Jio the biggest product launch ever?

Reliance Jio, the telecommunications service offering of Reliance Industries, has courted controversy with its aggressive launch and pricing strategy. But that controversy aside, the scale of its launch has been truly spectacular. Consider this,

Reliance Jio launched its 4G service commercially on September 5, 2016 offering free data and voice services. It crossed 50 million subscribers in just a matter of 83 days, and 100 million in 170 days, having added an average 6 lakh subscribers per day.

Even when compared to anything the Chinese have done across sectors, this is something truly staggering. And to have done it without the technical and logistical glitches associated with product launches and project roll-outs in such scale is a massive achievement. To have managed the logistics of customer acquisition and the challenge of the explosive load growth on technology systems is very impressive.

And, it appears that there is more to come,

JioPhone, a 4G VoLTE feature phone called ‘India ka Smartphone’... is a feature phone, but with a larger screen, access to apps and of course 4G data and 4G VoLTE calls and will effectively cost the customer Rs 0 for the device and Rs 153 per month as monthly tariff... The target is to make 5 million phones available every week. The JioPhone will always have free voice calls. From August 15, the JioPhone will come with free unlimited data. A similar quantity of data on any other operator’s network would cost up to Rs 5000 a month... The phone has been created by Indian engineers for an Indian audience, Mukesh Ambani said, “made in India for Indian users”. The phone will offer an innovative cable link to television to help users view content on a big screen at home. Users will need to buy the Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan package of Rs 309 to get the extra data needed for this. The phone also responds to voice commands, which is unprecedented for a feature phone anywhere in the world.

It begs the question whether the Jio is the most accomplished launch of any technical product or solution by public or private sector across the world?